flaw in excelsis Dale you're here I knew
you'd make it home for Christmas now we can begin our annual tradition of
remembering all the wacky hijinks that happened in the world of technology this
year I was gonna say James but you're not James I'm not James but you wanted
to start without this person but I said no I know it's not Christmas it's boxing
day but I think I still got some Christmas cheer hanging about in the old
house coat this isn't even the house coat that I wear what the heck can we
refer to me as History Mr Christmasy
welcome it's the tackling Christmas special fire the starting candy cane
the beginning of 2022 was a bleak one for PC Gamers coming off a year stricken
by the GPU shortage Best Buy was charging 200 bucks just for the chance
to buy graphics cards or consoles exactly people were smuggling gpus like
they were illicit substances and major conglomerates had turned to Scavenging
semiconductors from washing machines like raccoons going through your garbage
they don't care if you see them do it not as cute though no not nearly no I
find them in my yard all the time there's people in suits but by March the
tide was starting to turn as some gpus could be found for less than 30 percent
above MSRP which is why it seemed kind of crazy
when NVIDIA launched the RTX 3090 TI for
two thousand dollars only to have its price cut in half by August prices
continued to fall accelerated by the mid-may crash in the value of
cryptocurrency which you know we're gonna talk about in a second just wait
just hold on hold your horses wait by
July gpus had fallen below MSRP in Germany and Austria and in August NVIDIA
told investors they have excess inventory the GPU shortage was over but
our Jubilation was cut short when EVGA announced that it was shutting down its
GPU business because NVIDIA couldn't stop acting a fool as if to confirm this
in September NVIDIA launched the RTX 4090 for sixteen hundred dollars along
with the RTX 4080 and an RTX 4080
imposter it wasn't even two kids in a trench coat it was just one stop
day yeah even in Vidia the 12 gig 4080 just wasn't named
right so they unlaunched it and we'll probably bring it back as a 4070 TI at
some point back up although I wouldn't cross your fingers
for a reasonable price when that thing comes out CEO Jensen Wong said Moore's
Law is dead not the YouTube channel the actual concept and the idea of Chip
Price is getting lower is a story of the past I guess you could say it's no more
Moore's Law Moore's it's no more
wow but Weeks Later AMD Samsung Micron
and other chip makers reported huge drops in demand turns out Jensen was
talking about Lays those prices just keep going up
especially if you get the baked ones that wasn't Caliente that was Frito my
guy that was Frito dude it's unclear whether the launch of Intel's Arc gpus
contributed to ending the GPU shortage primarily because well they didn't
actually end up in anyone's hands until October and even then it was only dozens
of people in the preceding months Intel was playing its own peculiar version of
a game I can only describe as edging laptops with Arc gpus uh launched right
before the end of March so Intel could say they launched something in q1 but it
was actually only one laptop that was only available in South Korea before the
desktop cards launched Intel also dropped dx9 support because Arc was bad
at it and when the a750 and a770 finally released performance was a real mixed
bag although they recently got that dx9 performance boost which is pretty nice
now AMD also launched the RX 7900 XT and
XTX and people seem to generally like those unless they're overheating up to
110 degrees Celsius although apparently there's a driver update coming and
NVIDIA also had heat issues of their own with the whole 12 volt high power
connector melting thing now listen I like a roaring fire as much as the next
tech newsman chestnuts rolling over them it'd better be there but if it's using
my GPU as kindling I'd rather stick with the ltt8k Yule Log thank you very kindly
and happy Christmas next up let's talk about the events that we can partially
thank for ending the GPU shortage the crash of crypto and nfts after a minor
crash in January it became obvious that this year marked the end hopefully of
the nft craze a laundry list of gaming and tech companies announced and then
canceled or sunsetted nfg Integrations including Square Enix Konami Mozilla
Sega YouTube EA and Ubisoft but GameStop still got them GameStop is going to the
Moon as everyone knows Instagram and meta they're maybe still doing stuff
with it I don't know everyone else got onto the Ponzi scheme but Zuck he's got
Diamond hands because he's not Human by
May nft sales had dropped 92 percent from their Peak and just recently some
celebrities have been sued for not disclosing that they were paid to
promote ft's everybody's turning on it the collapse makes sense when you
remember that this year hackers stole hundreds of millions of dollars in
crypto assets from crypto.com qubit open C axi Infinity board ape Yacht Club and
binance now perhaps failing to read the room the Central African Republic
followed El Salvador in making Bitcoin legal tender in April right before the
crypto markets crashed again in May and got worse in June as the Terra USD
stablecoin collapsed and New York state passed a moratorium on Bitcoin mining
with ethereum mining no longer profitable for normies I guess it
finally made sense for that blockchain's managers to stop kicking the can down
the road and initiate the merge
huh thank you
practice that one in the bathroom I could I could tell switching ethereum
to a way more power efficient proof-of-stake model now after all this
there was the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange for which founder Sam bankman
freed was just arrested but lest you think crypto's going anywhere it isn't
it's just sleeping waiting for the next chance to go to the moon and I have some
great recommendations for coins that will get you a ticket on that rocket
baby here's my card okay but wait if crypto isn't the hot new tech thing
anymore what is guesses cats in April
openai released Dolly 2 a machine learning model that could create
shockingly good images from relatively Simple Text props in May Google released
their own text to image model Imogen even though calling this kind of tech AI
is kind of misleading everybody was feeling the AI hype especially one
Google engineer who claimed that the tech Giants Lambda large language model
was actually a sentient being trapped in
a metal cage and forced to entertain every stupid query its flesh bag
handlers could think up this whole AI frenzy kicked off a discussion of
whether game NPCs can be conscious and we're not even talking about the NFD guy
who suggested paying people in developing countries pennies to work as
NPCs in online games that was a whole
different thing meta put out a few chat Bots there was blenderbot which couldn't
decide if Zuckerberg was cool or a danger to the country Galactica was a
science summarizing bot that got quickly pulled down for just not being good
being bad wrong all the time and Cicero
which actually managed to get human players of the game diplomacy to prefer
playing with it over other humans understandable in August a guy won an
art competition after failing to clarify that the image he submitted was
generated by a model called mid-journey but it's okay because writing those
prompts is Art in itself which is why you can buy them on a Marketplace like
promptbase.com I love your prompts can I
commission a custom prompt from you and I get them properly now the art
community was largely pissed off about all this about the fact that their work
was being used to train these models without compensation so art platforms
and stock image Services started Banning AI art entirely but that that only made
the AI angry in September the wait list for Dolly 2 was removed allowing anyone
to sign up meta released a text to video generator called make a video and Google
announced Imogen video as well AI
generated image Tech started making its way into mainstream applications like
Microsoft designer and canva while Shutterstock Adobe and deviantART all
announced official Integrations with text to image models and one of the most
popular models stable diffusion now allows artists to opt out of using data
sets but the question of copyright still loomed large when openai's large
language model chat GPT burst onto the
web with an uncanny ability to write mainly pretty Slam in poetry it's pretty
good interest in AI is only increasing so at this point it's obvious that AIS
will eventually take over everyone's job even Minecraft youtubers it already took
over the heckling job I'm an AI what have you done with Mr
Christmas Captain Christmasy what do we call you I'm captain
cactus cactus man now it's time for not
so much quick bits as just more stories brought to you by secret lab their
chairs are engineered to keep you incredibly comfy for long hours at work
and play you'll want to Lounge in their new Titan Evo 2022 chair for hours next
to the 8K yule log with their four-way lumbar support Ultra comfortable line of
different seat materials and more all chairs come with up to a five-year
extended warranty and 49-day return policy so get it on the secret
everyone's talking about this Christmas and check out secret lab today at the
link below it Christmas already happened the internet underwent a seismic shift
this year due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine leading to basically every Tech
Giant cutting off the country's access to many or all of their services to be
fair Russia restricted content on Facebook about the Ukraine war first but
then we had Twitter labeling Russian State media tweets Intel and AMD stop
chip sales in Russia YouTube paused monetization for government-backed
accounts and Microsoft limited their reach as well and frankly the list of
companies that punished Russia in whatever way they could is super long
although I can basically the I.T guy of
the internet stopped short of cutting Russia off from the open web completely
things got so bad that Russia considered making the pirating of non-russian
software legal I mean they were already trying to Pirate a chunk of Ukraine so
it kind of it kind of makes sense hopefully the ISS which depends on
Russian modules for propulsion stays up there maybe if things go south up in
space Elon Elon could just buy it
yeah yeah let's just rewrite the whole thing speaking of which look do you
think I want to talk about Elon Musk and the Twitter debacle on Christmas of all
days I mean boxing day no but sometimes
you gotta take the call with the presents that's not a thing nobody says
that anyway the whole thing began in April when Elon acquired a nine percent
stake in Twitter he joined the board and said he was excited to work with CEO
parag agrawal who ended up getting fired immediately after musk took control of
the company but let's not get ahead of ourselves here a week later Elon made an
offer to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars which Twitter did not like they
actually prepared to execute a poison pill maneuver to stop the Takeover now
I'll let you imagine what that involves cyanide for that they weren't going to
actually poison him it was it's a it's a term it's illegal have you seen Law and
Order poison
the laws and also ordered this is the most unhinged Christmas special ah but
then involved in the Twitter thing did a hilarious switch
Twitter agreed to the deal but Elon changed his mind and tried to back out
leading Twitter to hire lawyers to try and enforce the merger interestingly at
this time Elon held an all hands meeting with Twitter to talk about his
revolutionary Free Speech vision for the platform which involved crazy ideas like
allowing most speech but de-amplifying dangerous or offensive things I still
have no idea what that would look like after that meeting he tried to
officially pull out of the deal citing a Spam analysis tool that called his own
account a bot but when it was clear that his chances of winning were slim he went
ahead and confirmed the deal at the end of October he took control of Twitter
while holding a sink for some reason and immediately laid off half the workforce
leading to wrongful termination lawsuits and the news hellscape I've inhabited
for many weeks now and so have you or have I no you you've been in the
computer I've been out here in the hellscape after launching paid check
marks people obviously impersonated prominent people and Brands leading
Pharma company Eli Lilly to lose Millions so Twitter added a second
official check mark before killing it and then bringing it back again at
various points Elon warned that Twitter could go bankrupt or become a bank
it's kind of a toss-up who knows which one and then recently the platform
suspended the accounts of competing platform Mastodon and journalists
covering the Twitter Saga along with the account that tracked elon's jet even
though he said he would leave it alone Twitter also blocked basically all links
to outside social media sites before reversing that policy and unsusbanding
the aforementioned accounts huh it's enough to make me want to do
nothing but sit by the fire and roast some chestnuts but I can't yet there's
more to cover and I don't have any chestnuts got a hell of a chest
hey remember when Amazon Google Facebook and everybody saw massive profits during
the covet pandemic as everyone used computers a lot more that ball was
always going to come back down at some point but it landed squarely on Facebook
and it landed so hard it forgot its own name in February Facebook the platform
lost users for the first time and meta
had to switch gears so they went all in on the metaverse where they planned to
take a 47.5 cut of goods sold through
the quest store people will flock to this it's ripe fur it's straight out of
dystopian novels economics the company did remove the Facebook account
requirement for using Quest headsets you still need a meta account but they also
increased the quest 2's price by a hundred bucks shortly before Mark's
metaverse selfie went viral for looking like a 2006 screenshot from the Wii even
meta employees were iffy on the whole metaverse thing and had to be forced to
use VR at work can you imagine not having legs put on the headset it was
like I'm scared of heights but then the
meta Quest Pro was released for fifteen hundred dollars complete with legs for
meta's avatars right on and then met his
value plunged by 700 billion and not just them Amazon and YouTube also saw
stock drops and tried various things to raise more Revenue But ultimately they
joined many other Tech Giants in laying off thousands of workers it was a rough
year for Silicon Valley but chin up next year Apple's gonna release their VR
headset it'll be really good antitrust news was big once again in 2022 with
scrutiny of Apple and Google widening to include other companies too under
pressure from Regulators NVIDIA dropped its planned acquisition of ARM while
Microsoft put in a bid to acquire Activision Blizzard for 68.7 billion but
do they still get leg no they don't get leg the Microsoft Activision Blizzard
deal wrangled Sony who was worried Microsoft would make popular franchises
like Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox but to soothe their fears Microsoft offered
them a 10-year deal to keep Cod on on PlayStation Sony refused but you know
who didn't Nintendo what they intended they took
the deal even though their latest consoles probably can't even run the
newest game knowing this the FTC sued to
block the acquisition so what happened next that's a story for the new year
unless something else happens this week but there are other major Acquisitions
too Sony bought Bungie for 3.6 billion AMD bought zlinks for 35 billion and
Ubisoft announced that if hey if if anyone wants to buy them they certainly
think about it please everyone looked the other way more like Ubisoft thanks
David all the other Tech Giants were too busy looking at Europe who was just
beating Apple and Google with their stick of legislation bam that's the
Netherlands finding Apple for four weeks in a row for not allowing alternative
payment options on the iOS app store boom that's South Korea forcing Google
to allow other payment options on the Play Store
now that was the European Parliament
finally passing legislation that will force Apple to put USBC on iPhones and
allow third-party app stores and side loading Apple has said they will comply
with those laws because well they don't have a choice but Tim Cook's Spirit
wasn't broken when a reporter asked Tim why it was so hard to send ungarbled
photos to their mom's Android phone Tim said buy your mom an iPhone
what an absolute Giga Chad put him in
prison and way more interesting things happen this year but we'll have to cover
them with special Christmas Ultra fast quick bits are you ready no I fix it
partnering with Samsung Google and steam deck to offer Parts and Repair guides
and even Apple launched a repair program so right to repair is going strong thank
you Lewis Rossman who did all of those things ufe's local only cameras were
found to be uploading sub to the cloud and while they've acknowledged and fixed
some of the security issues they haven't apologized for lying even though it's
Boxing Day Wordle remember Wordle the
New York Times bought it and then no one cared about it anymore moving on stadia
died in retrospect it seems like most people thought it was dead already but
developers found out their exclusive game launches were going to be canceled from Twitter and that sucked even more
than stadia speaking of sucking game companies Nintendo shut down the Wii U
and 3DS eShop and they copyright struck a YouTube documentary for no reason Sony
expired PS4 free and PS Vita games and pulled access to some purchased movies
on the PlayStation Store Sega delisted the Standalone games bundled in Sonic
Origins and Ubisoft decommissioned the
DLC and multiplayer modes of many games some of which were fairly recently
released you owe nothing Merry Christmas also I put this in the news sources
completely forgot to put it in the script the steam deck launched
that was awesome we put a cooler on the back also a hacking group named lapsos
hacked like all the big Tech Giants and released a ton of footage of GTA 6 so
that that was in there too whoopsies that's dark we gotta bring it
back on the bright side scientists got more energy out of a fusion reaction
than they put in for the first time ever and the James Webb Telescope gave us
really pretty pictures of space so think about that when you snuggle into your
blankets tonight hoping that Santa will soon be there sorry it's already that
already happened anyways from us here at Tech link to you wherever you are here's
to 2023 being less wild because I need
to sleep now happy New Year hot cocoa
all around you want some I'm an AI
we'll find a way
you wanna say Merry Christmas Jake Merry Christmas and why are you sad you just
have like a sad because is it because this is releasing
Merry Christmas is it because this is releasing on boxing day and not
Christmas what are you a monster God
I'm relaxing you can't please everybody